Monday, 26 March 2012

Dream.Build.Play: Update #2

Another 7 days have depleted from the Dream Build Play counter and I've been working on my entry over the weekend. Did I accomplish what I said I was hoping to in my last post? Not quite. But I did accompish something.

To the untrained eye, this screenshot would appear that I have done nothing. But this is not the case. I have moved the programme slots up by a bit and made the button prompts smaller :) I have also made it so the correct button prompts appear based on what programme the user has currently selected. I still need to add the additional information panel, but the menu is coming along.

But what good is a menu if you have no game to play, which brings me onto my next screenshot.

They say a picture says a thousand words, but with this picture I don't think that's the case. This is my loading screen for when loading up the main game. Following my television theme, I have gone for a loading screen that represents a network splash screen. These are the things that appear just before a programme begins. On this screen, the different coloured bars move from side to side while loading, but then slide into position once the game has loaded. I think it's nice and effective in motion, but this screenshot does not do it justice.

The last screenshot is the beginnings of my character selection screen. As you can see I've started designing my assets. This was a right pain as Blender (my modelling program of choice) as changed its interface since I last used it, so a lot of time was spent getting to grips with that. The functionality on this screen is basically in place with the signed in user being able to choice random avatars or their own (as long as they're signed in). The next step will be to produce the rest of the game assets and produce some on screen prompts so the user knows what to do on this screen. I also want to make it so that the user who initialised the game is already signed up.

The result of this weekends progress has lead to me realise that I will need to be doing more work on the game than initially wanted. This will take effect as of next week, as this week I'm hoping to do a bit more work on my platformer and I will not be present at my computer this weekend. However, I hope to have the character selection stage finished by the end of next week, with perhaps starting to code the main game. Only 78 days to go :)

3 comments:

Can you please fix the blinking Dream.Build.Play image so that this entire page (along with http://www.xnalastdance.com/) stop reflowing ever time the image blinks? I'd like to read what you have written here, but not through these repeating up and down shifts.

Hi "Anonymous". Glad to see someone is reading my blog :) I'm not able to see the effect that you are describing, but I have changed the way the countdown is populated which will hopefully stop you seeing the effect you described. I'm sorry that it stopped you from reading this post, along with other posts of mine or ones on xnalastdance.com. If you continue to experience the problem, please post again and I will try and sort it out.